Madeleine Juhrmann

Non-clinical researcher

Australia

mjuh9730@uni.sydney.edu.au

Doctorate Title: Palliative Paramedicine: Broadening the Role of Paramedics Delivering Palliative and End-of-Life Care in Australian Communities.

Doctorate Description: Broadening the role of paramedics to deliver evidence-based and best practice palliative care will address a major clinical workforce and service issue across Australia. As our population continues to age the demand for home-based deaths and palliative care services is rapidly increasing. One interface capable of improving the statistics to better reflect community preferences is paramedicine. Paramedics are a unique workforce in Australia, attending to patients in their home 24 hours a day seven days a week in the case of an emergency. However, their scope of practice has traditionally been limited to providing life-sustaining interventions for acute emergencies. This PhD project will be a mixed-methods exploration into the role of paramedics delivering palliative and end of life care in a community setting. A targeted systematic integrative review will investigate existing literature on the topic and identify gaps in knowledge. A policy review will follow, to analyse and compare existing Australian ambulance services' clinical practice guidelines (CPGs), identifying enablers and barriers to good practice. Interviews with key stakeholders will provide qualitative insights and the results will be used to construct a quantitative survey, to be distributed to a representative sample of paramedics to complete. The data from the surveys will indicate the prevalence of experiences and views shared during the qualitative process. Each of these studies will contribute to a growing body of evidence that will be translated into a CPG, better informing Australian ambulance services’ clinical practice and improving outcomes for patients requiring or preferring a palliative approach to their care. The research generated from the PhD will enhance out-of-hours emergency services, reduce avoidable hospital admissions and directly improve end of life care for patients with life-limiting illnesses.